Black Women Are Leaning In And Getting Nowhere

Black women want a seat at the table. And yet they are close to invisible at the highest ranks of corporate America, reveals data released Tuesday morning by consulting firm McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org, the nonprofit women’s leadership organization founded by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. 

This is the second year the organization has released the data, among the most comprehensive looks at how women are faring in the business world.

Overall, it’s not going terribly well. Women drop out of the corporate pipeline at high rates: For every 100 women promoted to manager (the first step on the track up the ladder), 130 men are advanced, the study found. Women get more pushback when they negotiate for raises, and are more likely to get labeled pushy or bossy by the higher-ups and generally receive less support from senior colleagues.

But women of color have it particularly bad, the study found. 

Defined as black, Asian or Hispanic, women of color make up just 3 percent of executives in the C-suite at the 132 North American companies surveyed, which include JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, General Motors and Facebook. Yet, these women comprise 20 percent of the United States population.

White women were also nowhere near parity in those high-level offices, but at 17 percent are doing much better by comparison.

“When women are stuck, corporate America is stuck,” Sandberg said in a statement. “We know that diverse teams perform better and inclusive workplaces are better for all employees, so we all have strong incentives to get this right.”

LeanIn.org

Women of color are far less likely to make it to the top in corporate America.

“Women of color are the most underrepresented group in the corporate pipeline,” write the authors of the report, which also surveyed women within these companies.

This is the second year that LeanIn.org and McKinsey have done this landmark survey. Though last year some data on women of color was included, the report did not break out pipeline data on women of color. 

The latest study looked at promotion and attrition rates at the various companies, which together employ more than 4.6 million people. Additionally, more than 34,000 employees at the companies responded to a survey on gender biases, work-life issues and career opportunities at their companies.

Women of color who responded to the survey, especially black women, tended to perceive their offices as less fair. Only 29 percent of black women said the best opportunities at their company go to the most deserving employees, compared to 47 percent of white women, 43 percent of Asian women and 41 percent of Hispanic women.

“This study makes clear that while all women remain underrepresented in the corporate pipeline, women of color face the steepest drop-offs,” LeanIn.org president Rachel Thomas said. 

When Sandberg’s corporate feminist manifesto Lean In came out in 2013, one of the most potent criticisms of the best-seller involved race. Many said the book, which urges women to speak up and be more ambitious at work, was less relevant for women of color, who face different challenges at the office.

Sandberg famously wrote that many women were giving up on attaining leadership roles in corporate America before their careers even took off. Women “leave before they leave,” she wrote, echoing a widely viewed TED Talk she gave in 2010. Essentially, the argument goes, women anticipate that they won’t be able to have full-throttle careers because at some point marriage and children will intercede. So they deliberately hold themselves back.

This may be a specific problem of white women, however. Women of color, according to surveys and plenty of anecdotal evidence, are far more ambitious. Indeed, black women participate in the labor market at higher rates than any other group of women.

While white women seem to struggle with whether or not to seek advancement at work, black women are far less ambiguous, according to a 2014 survey from the Center for Talent Innovation.

“In our research, we find black women are nearly 3 times more likely than white women to say they aspire to a powerful job with a prestigious title,” Tai Wingfield, one of the report’s authors and senior vice president of communications for the Center for Talent Innovation and managing director at Hewlett Consulting Partner, told The Huffington Post. 

In this year’s LeanIn.org survey, 48 percent of women of color said they aspire to leadership positions at their company, compared with 37 percent of white women. The difference is most stark at the entry level, where only 27 percent of white women aspire to be a top executive, compared with 41 percent of women of color.

Yet it’s white women who are far more likely to land top roles. After Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns leaves her post this year, there will be no black women CEOs in the Fortune 500, noted Melinda Marshall and Wingfield in a recent piece for Harvard Business Review.

“The problem is leadership isn’t seeing them ― those qualified, well educated black women who are vying for leadership but are being overlooked,” Wingfield told HuffPost.

“Black women are already ‘leaning in,’” Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, a psychology professor at Columbia University, wrote last year in a fascinating piece for Fortune on black female leadership.

Steve Marcus / Reuters

Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns is seen at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 11, 2012. The company refers to Burns as "chairman" rather than "chairwoman."

Part of the problem is “invisibility,” Purdie-Vaughns writes. When the average person thinks of a “woman leader,” she argues, the image that comes to mind is a white woman ― like Sandberg. If you picture a black leader, you’re more likely to think of a black man than a black woman.

“Because black women are not seen as typical of the categories ‘black’ or ‘woman,’ people’s brains fail to include them in both categories,” Purdie-Vaughns writes. “Black women suffer from a ‘now you see them now you don’t’ effect in the workplace.”

In Wingfield’s study, black women tell painful stories of how this plays at the office. One woman, after asking her boss about new opportunities at her firm, was told to be happy with what she’s achieved. “You’ve reached a milestone you’ve probably never imagined,” he tells her. “Do we really need to talk about what you haven’t yet achieved?” 

Yvette Miley, a senior executive at MSNBC, describes her experiences in the 1990s speaking up at editorial meetings only to see her ideas get ignored until a male colleague repeated it and had the buy-in of the room.

What seems clear is that the managers and executives who make decisions about promotions and advancement may have unconsciously absorbed some of these stereotypes and are holding back women of color.

And to make things even tougher, many companies aren’t very focused on racial diversity to begin with. According to LeanIn.org’s numbers, 55 percent of companies say racial diversity is a top priority. Gender diversity gets far more attention, with 78 percent of companies saying they’ve made it a top goal.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that more than 34,000 women answered survey questions as part of LeanIn.org and McKinsey’s new report. In fact, both men and women participated in the survey. 

You Might Want To Check Your Washing Machine. It Could Explode.

First it was your cell phone battery, now your washing machine could be in danger of exploding. 

The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning this week to owners of certain top-loading Samsung washing machines, saying the appliances may pose safety issues.

The warning comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit customers have filed against the company claiming that their washing machines exploded during use, according to CNN.

Samsung said in response to the CPSC warning on its website that it was in active discussions with the agency about safety issues affecting some top-loading washing machines made from March 2011 to April 2016. The website also includes a way for customers to check if their machine is one of the affected products.

“In rare cases, affected units may experience abnormal vibrations that could pose a risk of personal injury or property damage when washing bedding, bulky or water-resistant items,” the company wrote.  

Do not buy or use #Samsung top-load washer. They might explode like ours did this morning. No joke. @Samsungtweets pic.twitter.com/WpifAgrgAl

— Chris Potts (@ctpotts) July 10, 2015

The company recommends consumers with affected models use the lower speed delicate cycle while washing bulky materials, saying that no “abnormal vibrations” slash explosions have been reported when customers use this cycle.

On Wednesday, Consumer Reports suspended its recommended status for any Samsung top-loading washing machine that earned that designation. The publication did note that none of the Samsung top-loaders experienced this issue during its washing machine tests, though researchers did not wash bedding or bulky items.

Carolyn Forte, director of Home Appliances and Cleaning Products Lab at the Good Housekeeping Institute, pointed out that today’s washers have super-fast spin cycles compared to machines in decades past. While she couldn’t speak about the Samsung cases in particular, she did note that high-spin speeds might cause a machine to go “off balance or become unevenly distributed possibly causing the machine to vibrate even more than normal.”

Head over to Samsung’s website to check if your machine is affected.

My 2013 'Warning' Letter To Wells Fargo's CEO John Stumpf

It comes as no surprise to me that employees at Wells Fargo resorted to dishonesty in opening bogus accounts, just to keep their jobs. Why am I not surprised? Because in 2013, after six years of employment, my sister was about to lose her job at Wells Fargo because she could not meet her sales goals. I wrote this letter to CEO John Stumpf, advising him that the intense sales culture was damaging to employees and consumers. I received a startling response. But first, here is that letter:

March 27, 2013

Mr. John Stumpf,
Chairman and CEO
Wells Fargo & Company
420 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94104

Dear Mr. Stumpf:

Knowing how busy you are, I apologize for the length of this letter; but as a long-time customer, I ask that you please grab a cup of coffee or tea, sit back, and take the ten minutes you will need to read this letter through to its end.

I very recently became aware of Wells Fargo's Vision Statement through a graduate school paper my niece was writing for a course. I was reading it, and here is what stood out:

"Our vision has nothing to do with transactions, pushing products or getting bigger for the sake of bigness. It's about building lifelong relationships one customer at a time."

Ironically, my sister, who has worked as a teller for Wachovia/Wells Fargo for almost six years and is terrific with customers, is about to lose her job. This is not due to unprofessional behavior. It is not due to excess absences. It is not due to transactional errors. It is not due to lack of excellent customer service. What it is due to is her failure to continue to meet sales goals through pushing products.

She transferred from a large public branch to a Wells Fargo branch located on a military base in Xxxxxx, XX. It is a controlled location with limited opportunity for sales, since new customers cannot just walk in off the streets. That my sister is extremely reliable, has rarely missed a day of work, is well liked by customers and her manager, offers excellent customer service, and does a very good job as a teller, seemingly counts for nothing.

The fact is, she cannot meet Wells Fargo's designated product sales goals and is therefore on her final warning and expects to be unemployed within a month. It seems extraneous circumstances, like branch demographics or economic anomalies, are not taken into account by Wells Fargo when it comes to setting goals for evaluating employee productivity and determining job retention.

For example, when sequestration cuts occurred on March 1, 2013, I thought to myself, this is going to hurt military people in terms of jobs and pay. My sister will have even less opportunity to sell. Indeed, the military healthcare system is affected, and will be cut by $3 billion. Any expendable income that might have gone into a new account -- perhaps a Custodial College Savings Account -- will be diverted for basic necessities, like health care and food. Hiring freezes, smaller staffs, and furlough days... All of these things, I thought, will affect military families' finances, and consequently my sister's employment status.

My niece (this sister's daughter) worked for Wells Fargo for a year before going back to get her Master's at California State University. Since she and her mother have both been enmeshed in the Wells Fargo "sales culture," she found it contradictory that your Vision Statement cites customer retention and relationships, not the pushing of products. The fact is, on the front line, that vision does not hold true. There is so much emphasis on the sale of any product that a teller cannot realistically ascertain all of a customer's financial goals, as is also declared in your Vision Statement.

I was a banker in Miami, Florida in times when (besides location) great customer service was the most important inducement a bank had to offer. I have been a branch manager, a commercial lender, and a VP in charge of a private banking division. I "retired" at the age of 36, and I am now 58, so I have been out of banking for a very long time, it's true. But I experienced tremendous growth in my branches, in my lending portfolio, and in our private banking division. And I distinctly attribute that growth to excellent customer service, which led to customers entrusting me and my bank with all aspects of helping them reach their financial goals.

Now let's look at Wells Fargo's Values Statement, which was also in my niece's paper:

"When they're (employees) properly supported, incented, rewarded, encouraged and recognized, they're even more satisfied with their jobs, providing even better service for our customers."

This is a time unlike any other in Corporate America history, when production goals are very high, with fear and anxiety being the prevalent motivators. Yet Wells Fargo states that support, incentive, reward, encouragement, and recognition are its employees' motivators. In truth, neither my sister nor my niece ever felt this was a part of the Wells Fargo culture. Rather, all employees hear is that keeping their jobs depends on sales.

The motivators you tout are lost in the intense sales culture, and the job satisfaction asserted in the Values Statement is illusory. It seems to me that firing a very good employee of six years because she can no longer meet her sales goals, then hiring and training a new employee, with the expectation of that employee having a better, immediate and all-knowing grasp of customers' financial goals, is ideally and fiscally unsound.

I must tell you I learned of my sister's plight from her daughter (my niece referred to herein.) My sister has never voiced her concerns as complaints. She is grateful to have her job. So when I learn that she -- who would have been a valuable employee to me as a manager because of her work ethic and her customer relations skills -- is about to lose her job because she cannot meet rigid sales goals at her particular branch, I am saddened and distressed on her behalf. She needs her job, and so she works very loyally and diligently and does succeed in every aspect of her job over which she has direct control -- like great customer service and financial transactional skills.

My husband and I are long-time (Wachovia) Wells Fargo personal and corporate customers who still appreciate a banking relationship with the people of our local branch, though we do a great deal of our banking electronically. We recently had to obtain some information from our WF branch, via phone, regarding a wire transfer from Europe. While looking up the information, your employee made a sales pitch for a home equity line. While I admired the effort, I was once again reminded of the intense need to sell. I think this underscores my assertion that an employee cannot know a customer's financial goals when he makes a stab at selling just any product over the phone during an information-seeking call. It is all about sales, but then again, if he didn't ask, there is no chance at all for a sale! So that's good...But must keeping a job depend solely on sales? What about the good service he provided by getting me the information I needed? That matters, and that is what will keep me a lifelong customer.

So, Mr. Stumpf, I have addressed you from three perspectives: A relative to an employee, a former commercial banker, and a customer. I think all of these qualify me to give you an honest assessment of how your Values and Visions Statements fail to faithfully filter down to the front-line employees at the branch level.

That said, I am ending this letter with my thanks for your having read it, and with a wish for a more aware and benevolent Wells Fargo corporate culture--one that recognizes the value of excellent service in customer retention; and one that acknowledges dedicated, long-term, hard-working employees like my sister with the most coveted reward of all...Continued gainful employment.

Sincerely,

REBECCA WARNER

In just a matter of days, I received a letter from Claudia Tokarz, employee Customer Relations, saying that she was writing on behalf of Senior Management at Wells Fargo Bank, responding to my letter to Mr. Stumpf, Chairman and CEO. Did my sister keep her job? My next blog will answer that question.

GM Wants To Fill The Gap Volkswagen's Dieselgate Scandal Left

In June 2014, General Motors CEO Mary Barra stood stern-faced in front of her employees and a battalion of cameras and said: “I never want to put this behind us.”

The Detroit auto giant had admitted to selling cars with faulty ignition switches that caused the vehicles to turn off without warning in the middle of driving. At least 124 people died in accidents caused by the defect.

Since then, the company has taken pains to refurbish its image. GM invested $500 million in the ride-hailing startup Lyft ― the “nice guy” runner-up to industry goliath Uber ― and vowed to help it build a fleet of self-driving taxis. It committed last week to running 100 percent of its operations with renewable energy by 2050. It poured money into electric vehicles, enough to beat Tesla Motors at its own game, bringing the first affordable, mass-appeal all-electric car to market. 

Now, GM plans to tap a market left wide open after the biggest auto industry scandal since its own infamous ignition switch failure. Last week, the automaker announced plans to offer a diesel option with the 2018 model Chevrolet Equinox, its best-selling small sport utility vehicle. The move comes a year after Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker by sales, admitted to cheating on U.S. regulatory tests for its diesel cars, which spewed 40 times the legal limit of smog-causing emissions into the air.

The German auto giant agreed to pay a record $14.7 billion to settle with the U.S. government. Last month, the Department of Justice announced a plea deal with an engineer who designed the engine workaround. Unlike any executives involved in GM’s scandal two years ago, he may now face jail time.

Both incidents implicate companies that took fatal risks by sending to market products that weren’t quite ready. Volkswagen failed to design a diesel engine that could meet U.S. standards, so it cheated, causing, according one study, up to 60 premature deaths. GM, fearing an expensive recall, continued to sell faulty cars for nearly a decade after discovering the flaw. 

Popular in Europe, diesel ― which is roughly 30 percent more efficient than gasoline ― has struggled to catch on in the United States. Diesel-powered vehicles made up just 3 percent of total U.S. sales in 2014. Volkswagen made up about half of them, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

As The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday:

GM hopes to fill a niche in the U.S. vacated by its German rival’s pullback. And Chevrolet last year added a diesel-engine option to its Colorado midsize pickup that has drawn favorable reviews from car critics, emboldening GM to expand its diesel offerings.

“It’s only been since the VW challenges that people have been sort of scratching their heads a little bit” about diesels, GM North America President Alan Batey said in an interview. “But we’ve been absolutely thrilled with how they’ve taken off for us.”

If GM can popularize diesel vehicles, the company can help reduce the overall carbon footprint of its fleet, which it’s aggressively pushing to modernize with electric, self-driving alternatives. Slashing, and ultimately finding ways to eliminate, carbon emissions from vehicles is critical to meeting goals set in last December’s historic 180-nation Paris climate agreement.

Last year, Barra, announcing the company’s better-than-expected third-quarter earnings, declared that GM was “a vastly different company today than just five years ago.”

Whether GM can succeed where Volkswagen failed may be the clearest test of that yet. 

GM did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. 

Wells Fargo Faces Proposed Class Action Lawsuit Over Bogus Account Scandal

Wells Fargo & Co, embroiled in a scandal over the opening of sham accounts, was sued on Friday by customers who accused the bank of fraud and recklessness for its behavior.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Utah, and seeks class-action status on behalf of hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide.

Wells Fargo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last week, the San Francisco-based lender agreed to pay $190 million to settle regulatory charges that employees opened some 2 million accounts without customers’ knowledge, in order to meet sales targets.

Wells Fargo, the country’s third-largest bank by assets, has said it has fired 5,300 people over the matter and would eliminate sales goals in its retail banking on Jan. 1, 2017.

Federal prosecutors have begun examining Wells Fargo’s practices, and the bank’s Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf is scheduled to testify before Congress next week.

In the complaint, three plaintiffs said customers were hurt by “abusive and fraudulent tactics” used by employees who felt they had to “do whatever it takes,” including selling products they did not need or want, to meet sales quotas.

It was not immediately clear how the three named plaintiffs were specifically harmed by the bank’s alleged wrongdoing.

The case is Mitchell et al v. Wells Fargo Bank NA et al, U.S. District Court, District of Utah, No. 16-00966.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Donald Trump Could Slow Clean Energy's Hard-Won Progress

On the face of it, a Donald Trump presidency would not be good for the renewable energy industry.

The infamously fact-averse Republican nominee has called climate change a “hoax” invented “by the Chinese.” He has pledged to revive the coal industry, dismantle the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and renege on commitments to the historic climate accord reached in Paris last year. He has complained that wind turbines are “killing all of the eagles,” and says solar power is “not working so good,” in part because it’s “very, very expensive.”

Yet SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive says he doesn’t fear the prospect of a Trump victory in November.

“It may slow down the advancement of our goal to accelerate clean energy,” Rive, whose company is the largest solar installer in the country, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, one party may champion solar more than the other.”

But away from the spotlight of a bitter election, the partisan divide disappears, he said. 

“It’s not that way when you speak to voters, Democratic or Republican,” Rive said. “They are all very supportive.”

He may be right. Renewable energy enjoys broad public support. A majority of Trump voters believe that global warming exists and is caused by humans, according a poll released in May. More than half of homeowners listed solar as the energy source most important to the country, followed by wind power and natural gas, according to a survey of 1,400 homeowners conducted last year by the polling firm Zogby Analytics. (The results should be taken with a grain of salt ― SolarCity paid for the poll ― but the success of solar in traditionally Republican terrain makes the poll worth noting.)

Even Barry Goldwater Jr. ― son of the conservative icon and former Republican presidential nominee to whom Trump is sometimes compared ― has for the past three years waged an unlikely fight against utility companies in support of solar energy.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive is the cousin of billionaire Elon Musk, who serves as chairman of the solar company.

Perhaps more importantly, the industry is in a good position. Incentives for clean energy are expected to continue regardless of who ends up in the White House, as a budget deal reached last December extended a solar investment tax credit until the end of 2021 ― a 30 percent credit that helps the industry compete against the heavily subsidized oil and gas sectors. Meanwhile, the price of solar installations has plummeted 63 percent since 2011, and it’s expected to keep getting cheaper.

Rooftop solar grew by more than 1,000 percent since 2010, at one point propelling stocks like SolarCity to $86 per share. Since, then growth has slowed. Until Congress extended the investment tax credit, many in the industry expected demand for solar to slump by 71 percent next year. But now, it could instead climb by 5.5 percent, according to Bloomberg.

And the sun should keep shining on solar ― in part because of the dark horizon for coal.

The coal industry has imploded, battered by competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables. In just the past year, Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Patriot Coal all went bankrupt. The cost of energy from a new coal-fired power plant climbed to north of $50 per megawatt-hour, according to data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By contrast, the price of solar hit a new low of $29.1 per megawatt-hour at a new plant slated to come online in Chile in 2020. For natural gas, which likely topped coal last year as the United States’ biggest source of electricity, that figure averages out to about $53 per MWh. 

Rive isn’t alone in his assessment. Others in the industry are trying to stay positive about the possibility of a Trump presidency.

“The Clinton campaign has put forward detailed proposals that will promote the growth of solar in the U.S.,” Christopher Mansour, vice president of federal affairs at the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association, told HuffPost in a statement. “The Trump campaign has been less specific regarding solar development.”

“A Trump presidency would probably not be the worst disaster, given that support is grandfathered in at the federal level,” said Jenny Chase, head of global solar analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Chase says the fight has moved instead to the states, where solar companies navigate a patchwork of net metering policies ― rules that allow households or businesses with solar panels to sell excess electricity back to the grid during the day.

Trump could damage renewable energy development on the state level. He has threatened to discard President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, which includes a $4 billion fund to provide state incentives to develop clean energy. A Trump presidency could also embolden utility companies already fighting back against state-level solar incentives.

“Assuming Trump follows through on the sort of policy statements he’s put out on energy, such as undoing the Obama administration’s climate rules and getting rid of the Clean Power Plan, that would definitely have an impact on solar development,” Molly Christian, a senior reporter at S&P Global Market Intelligence’s SNL Financial trade publication, told HuffPost. “It’d slow it down. It wouldn’t grow as quickly.”

The opposite may be true under Clinton, who has vowed to transform the U.S. into a “clean energy superpower.” Her ambitious climate plan, while lacking some key proposals, includes a $60 billion clean energy fund and a goal of increasing solar capacity by 700 percent by the end of the decade. 

In all, Trump still represents a profound threat to the U.S. economy, which could lose about $1 trillion by 2021 if he wins, according a forecast released this week from Oxford Economics.

“Apart from the whole U.S. descending into chaos, wouldn’t all U.S. companies take a hit?” Chase, who is British, said of a Trump victory, laughing. “I don’t think it will necessarily be a solar issue.”

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularlyincitespolitical violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe,racist, misogynist and birther who hasrepeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — fromentering the U.S.

Robert Scoble: Here's Why Virtual Reality Will Change Everything

Robert Scoble has been at the forefront of the technological trendlines in Silicon Valley his entire life. Now he’s dedicating all of his time to virtual and mixed reality. But why?

If you pinch the little Cirque du Soleil artist you can make her bigger and when you click on her she will start performing just for you. Right there in front of you by your desk. At the same time a zombie is coming through the wall while the CNN is on next to your work screen. Sounds like a fantasy come true. Well, it is.

Robert Scoble has seen it. Just like he has seen a lot of other stuff from the frontier of technology for the most part of his life growing up in Silicon Valley. And there has been some crazy things going on around him. Microsoft happened. Apple too. And then Facebook. Silicon Valley has been the center of technological innovation in a lot of industries. It’s been like a science fiction tv-series for the last 20 years with more breakthroughs and disruptions of industries than killings in Game of Thrones.

But you’ve seen nothing yet.

Now it’s time for something even more radical. It’s time for virtual reality and the even more immersive mixed reality as Robert Scoble favors.

“20 years ago one of my friends had a complete set up for VR games. And it worked. Only the computer running it cost a million dollars. Now you can get the same technology the size of a mobile device for just 2000 dollars.”

And that changes everything, says Scoble.

“Now we have low cost, small size and more bandwidth. But most importantly we have social systems. Like Facebook. And that’s why VR, AR and mixed reality will not only stay but change everything,” says Robert Scoble of UploadVR. And that’s when he starts to explain the six technologies that are fundamental to create all these new devices that will mix our reality with artificial experiences.

He’s fast paced. It’s about optics, sensors, high speed, dimension mapping, artificial intelligence as in deep learning. And audio. Audio will be tremendously important in the field of virtual and mixed realities.

It’s not that Robert Scoble is fast paced for the sake of speed. He is after all reclining horizontally in a sofa as we speak at the Trouble offices in Copenhagen. Like a missionary buddha of technology trendlines. But Robert Scoble is a storyteller with a lot of information. Just take a look at his social media appearances on Facebook and Twitter and his Scobleizer blog.

We’ll skip the technological explanation for now and go straight to consequences.

“We’re now in the fourth state of user interface of the personal computer era. The first was character mode as we saw in MS-DOS. The second was the GUI as in Graphical User Interface known from Macintosh and Windows. The third was touch as we know from the iPhone or Android. And here comes the fourth of spatial computing.”

It’s the most intuitive thing there ever was in computer interfaces. There almost is no interface. But to grasp the full potential of it you have to try it for yourself. You can design things in virtual reality and manufacture them in real life with the push of a button.

The article continues under the video.

So it’s three dimensions but this is not like 3D TV where it’s just an effect. This is actually a 3D replication of the world. Think about that. Or let Robert Scoble explain:

“We’re gonna put basketball games on the floor and I’m gonna be able to go on the court with Steven Curry and the Warriors and then I’m gonna stop the game and practice my three point shot right next to him. And I’m gonna hit play and see if he makes the shot the same way I did. He might even turn to me and give me some tips.”

And the thing that will tie all these new ideas together will be the social layer of the internet. If it’s gaming, everything is more fun when you play with someone else. In journalism it feels more real if you bring people virtually to a refugee camp in Syria instead of reading about it. Art will be extreme when you do anything you want. Medicine will change because you can better diagnose concussions. It is already happening.

“Everything about our world is going to change. And this means deep cultural change. The kind of change we saw in the 1960’s when the electric guitar brought us rock’n roll, when the pill brought us the sexual revolution and when the space race brought us to the Moon and gave us the internet.”

It feels promising. But will the feelings be real, virtual or mixed?

Let’s dive in.

...

For daily perspectives, rants, thoughts & ideas you should follow the Trouble people on Facebook. This post originally appeared on Trouble Stories.